THE Isle of Man - still in some ways Liverpool's off-shore island of dreams.

THE Isle of Man - still in some ways Liverpool's off-shore island of dreams.

The TT races, horse-drawn trams, cats with no tails, the Laxey water wheel, the fairy glen supposedly inhabited by the "little people" (pictured) and the heights of Snaefell.

A micro-climate in the midst of the Irish Sea, and home to many species of tropical plant.

For generations of Scousers, 227 square miles of sun and sand escapism that was easily to hand more than a century before the first package flights left for Majorca during the late 1950s.

But there was a darker side too. Even a place so small and so seemingly perfect could not make itself immune to murder.

Such crime stories may take on a quasi-exotic image when they are well away from the big cities of the British mainland.

There are even those who may conclude that a new book cataloguing slayings on the island has the authentic ring of a north-western version of Bergerac's adventures in Jersey.

But what former Liverpool medic Keith Wilkinson has unearthed are true and gory tales of the ultimate crime committed in the midst of what was the UK's ultimate pleasureland.

Keith, 46, worked at the Royal, Alder Hey, Broadgreen and Arrowe Park hospitals in Merseyside before moving to the Isle of Man in 1990 to become consultant anaesthetist at Noble's Hospital, Douglas.

"I have chosen some of the most fascinating murders which have taken place over the past 150 years.

"Nowadays, the Isle of Man has a population of 80,000, and was often thought of as a place of relatively little crime. That was certainly the case in the past."

The only headlines most people can recall post-war are of deliquents being birched.

How many times did you hear said on the streets of Liverpool: "If we had that here, they wouldn't go back for a second dose"?

As everyone knows, corporal punishment was abolished.

But how many realise that the death penalty existed in the Isle of Man until just 10 years ago?

Right up until that time, Isle of Man judges, known as deemsters, and dressed in sobre black gowns, would pronounce at the end of a successfully prosecuted murder trial that the accused "be hanged by the neck until dead, and that the body of such person shall be buried within the precincts of the prison."

Although the last time those harrowing words rang out were but a decade ago - almost 30 years after the last and consecutive hangings on the mainland, at Walton and Strangeways prisons in August 1964 - the Manx death sentences of latter years were automatically commuted to life imprisonment by the British home secretary.

Not so lucky was John Kewish, the last person to go to the gallows in the Isle of Man, and whose case is one reviewed by Keith Wilkinson.

And believe it or not, that execution was as long ago as 1872.

The reason for this is that murder was indeed rare on the island at one time. A murder trial in 1973 was the first there for 43 years.

However, since then, there has been a dramatic increase in cases, with 11 murder trials.

So, imagine, in those less violent years of the late nineteenth century, when most Manx folks earned a living from the country or the surrounding sea, Kewish's arraignment for the murder of his father was a sensation that featured in newspapers throughout the UK.

Kewish lived in Glen Moar in a house near his parents. He was of limited intelligence and known to be a loner.

After a row, he stabbed his 69-year-old father to death with a pitchfork.

After a first abortive trial, and a retrial, at which the jury retired for just 34 minutes, John Kewish was dispatched from the court-room to meet his fate.

There was only one problem. As it had been a full 40 years since the last execution, the gallows at Castle Rushen jail were found to be in disrepair.

In a mad panic, and with three days to go, the authorities sent out for a carpenter. But whether by genuine concern or through superstition, no individual carpenter on the island would do the job and a firm in Castletown finally took the order.

Nor was there anyone qualified or willing to carry out the hanging.

Thus after a telegram to the Home Office in England, the mainland's chief executioner, William Calcraft, was given the job.

On July 27, he boarded the steamer Tynwald at Liverpool and sailed forth to carry out his first Manx execution.

On arrival in Douglas, he was recognised from press photographs and whisked off to the prison.

Calcraft expressed satisfaction with the new gallows which had a drop of 18-inches - quite enough to dispatch the overweight, squat Kewish to the next world.

At 7.30am on August 1, Calcraft, dressed in black, and witnessed by journalists, carried out the sentence.

At the very moment the prison chaplain spoke the words: "Lord Jesus, we beseech thee, receive the soul of John Kewish," the trap door on the scaffold opened.